July 11, 2013

The availability of low-cost, large-area CdTe panels coupled with localized manufacturing partners hastens the widespread achievement of grid parity for utility scale solar, the company says.

Conventional cadmium telluride (CdTe) modules measure just 0.72 square meters, a limitation that stems from the use of high temperature CdTe deposition processes.

CdTe is used to make thin film solar cells, among the lowest-cost types of solar cell. CdTe was pioneered by BP and is now led by First Solar. The main competing technology is crystalline silicon (c-Si).

In a play to outdo First Solar, RSI has now developed a proprietary tool and low-temperature process, known as Rapid Efficient Electroplating on Large-areas (REEL), that both speeds the plating step and eliminates constraints on CdTe panel area

“RSI’s breakthrough is that we use electroplating rather than vacuum deposition to create the CdTe layer,” Paul Fox, RSI Vice President of Corporate Development, explained to KurzweilAI.

Thin-film solar cell (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

“Because the processing temperature is low, it is gentle to the glass and we can use large glass sheets that are 2–3 times the size of First Solar’s.”

Achieving ‘grid parity’

The cost of solar panels has fallen a tremendous amount in recent years as PV technology follows the learning curve. This fall in prices has led to an explosion in PV installations, although most are still subsidized in some way.

Right now, manufacturing costs of PV panels are around 60–70 cents per Watt. Unfortunately, current PV technologies are approaching a plateau at around 40–50 cents per Watt, said Fox “We need to drive down the cost of the panels (measured in $ per Watt) to achieve widespread grid parity. (“Grid parity” is when the price of renewable electricity equals the price of fossil fuel based electricity.)

The availability of low-cost, large-area CdTe panels developed by RSI coupled with a business model that leverages regional manufacturing partners promises to break through this plateau and enable costs lower than 40 cents per Watt by 2014, said Fox. “In the future those costs may fall by half again. Somewhere along that ride we will hit the tipping point.”

“When we founded the company we recognized that in thin-film, you needed larger panel sizes with higher power outputs, in addition to efficiency, to truly differentiate against silicon,” said said RSI Co-founder and President Kurt Weiner. “We’ve achieved both at RSI.”

RSI has been developing low cost electroplating processes since 2009. RSI is now offering a “virtual turnkey” manufacturing capability to a single licensee in each major region of the world.

Comments (18)

It cost me about $1.50 per watt two years ago for my 40 panels. Micro-inverters were another $149 per panel. PG&E charges around 40 cents per kWh (once the first tiers are gone, only 11 kWh per day). I did the installation – the inverters were pre-cabled, the aluminum supports all just bolt together with fittings to tie down panels. Estimated lifetime cost about 8 cents per kWh. Payback about 3 years. Current bill $4/mo. Old bill $750/mo.

The cost of continuing oil burning or even continuing burning local wood and coke even for simple heating, cooking and machine powered work iby families in he most humble poverty if continued at this rate will cause the death of plant and animal world ecology and spread of deserts.. We could lose this whole planet. Whats the cost of that? A planet that lets in solar heat with an atmosphere that will not let all the heat out will burn. Venus,,our sister planet has a ground level; heat of about 6,000 degrees! So far we are lucky/

The panels are just one component of the cost. Inverters, storage and chargers, controllers, mounting, etc. and of course labor and soon permits yada-yada-yada, tree cutting, more permits, and inspections. Even if the panels went to zero a 5 KW off-grid roof installation is a major investment.

I think they’re talking about manufacturing costs, not retail or installed cost. First Solar broke the $1 per watt barrier a couple years ago and $0.70 per watt sounds about right given the trend. I wrote a paper on this for my MBA statistics class and linearly projecting out the trends, it would drop to about $0.15 a kilowatt hour by 2017 (cost spread over the lifespan of the installation, about 20 years). But as we know from reading Kurzweil, these trends tend to progress exponentially, so it will likely happen before then. I just didn’t have access to software that would create an exponential curve fit at the time, and I wasn’t willing to calculate it by hand. Anyway, if I remember correctly they need to get down around $0.10 a watt or lower for this to compete with grid power without government subsidy due to the very high cost of installation. Electricians are very highly paid in the U.S., which I’m assuming is the reason it’s so expensive.

It seems to me that a couple of months ago, I read that grid parity for photovoltaics had been achieved in Italy and in India. If that is true , this breakthrough out to be the death knell for fossil fuels in those countries.
Such as situation should also spur a lot of investment in the solar industry. I also would like to see a Manhattan Project type push for what Donald Sadoway is doing at Ambri. That would do a lot to further wind, solar, and wave energy.

It’s probably due to the low cost of labor in those countries. Italy kind of surprises me though. I thought they had similar labor costs to the U.S. If they weren’t so expensive to install in the U.S., photovoltaics would have already beat grid cost by quite a bit.

Glad they keep making progress…. but when I do any google searches of Grid Parity, I get a lot of different graphs and few of them seem to be accurate. In summary the above article says they are making panels at 70 cents per watt and I think local Power stations are making power at about 9 cents per watt. I wonder if we made better Fission reactors if that cost could actually go down to 4 cents range, making the real gap larger. (or making the graphs wrong to show cost of electric going up). Maybe they also develop a better way to burn coal cleaner, so that might allow for costs to come down also in the future.

Make sure not to confuse watts with watt/hours. The price per watt of a solar panel is the price of the solar panel, and the wattage is what it would make if it were in direct sunlight (you can think of wattage like speed, and watt/hours like distance).

Most solar panels in the USA make about 5 hours of energy a day, so a 200 watt panel will make around 1000 Watt/hours every day.

To compare a solar panel with a coal power plant, you need to do a very complicated assessment of how much (and how direct) the sunlight on the panel is, the price of coal over the 20 (or 30, or 15) year lifetime of the panel, the price of the building the power plant, and the price of distributing the coal power or storing the solar power if necessary in batteries. There is no single “grid parity”, because you also have to take into account land and installation costs, mounting hardware, inverters and / or batteries, future expectations of grid power costs, etc.

Many people might pay more (lets say 16 cents or double what you would pay for electric bill), just to know you had less impact on the environment (because the electric you use in your house or car comes from some coal burning and thus bad for the environment). Maybe the manufacturing process of making the solar panels is also hard on the environment and has to be factored in somehow also….. Right now there are lots of tax breaks and other advantages to solar companies to help push R&D and keep costs down, so it is hard to see the actual cost of solar, but one day that will dry up and actual costs need to be used to make a true comparison.

There’s one other very significant factor to consider. Worldwide, fossil carbon receives approximately $500 billion in subsides annually. For instance, until recently, the Chinese government supplied many power plants with free coal. There is nothing rational, in the scientific sense, about the world’s energy system; least of all that the costs of environmental degradation levied by fossil fuel use have been largely externalized from the producers’ point of view. Since producers have no corporate liability for this damage, they have no incentive to shift from their current extractive business model to a sustainability model.